Pearl of wisdom: Spears Business faculty member elevating AI integration in higher education

Pearl of wisdom: Spears Business faculty member elevating AI integration in higher education

Friday, November 1, 2024

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When artificial intelligence became a buzzword on campuses across the globe, many faculty members shuddered at the thought of rampant cheating and zombified students whose brains would atrophy like a muscle no longer being used.

Not Dr. Pearl Sumathi.

"I was never even for a minute apprehensive," Sumathi said. "All of the talk was centered on, 'Students are not going to think anymore; they'll have AI do the assignments for them.' While these concerns are somewhat valid, I was confident that with appropriate human oversight we can address and overcome these challenges."

An assistant professor of professional practice in the Oklahoma State University Department of Management, Sumathi spent two decades working in human resources and talent development before joining the Spears School of Business in fall 2019. At OSU, her overarching goal has been to connect theory with actual business practices, helping bridge the gap between theoretical insights and their practical implementation in the workplace.

Demystifying AI to show its real-world potential is Sumathi's new passion. In fact, she is dedicating her postdoctoral work to the integration of AI in higher education, and her hope is that students across the country are better prepared because of her research.

"You're not compromising the value of education, but you're augmenting the value of education by bringing AI into the scenario," she said. "AI has entered almost every business and industry, and if our students do not know what AI is and how to use it responsibly, I feel we are doing them a big disservice."

Sumathi has many groundbreaking and creative ideas on how to introduce her students to AI, and she has no qualms about borrowing ideas from others. For example, the P.A.I.R. Framework (the acronym stands for Problem, AI, Interaction, Reflection) for helping students choose and evaluate AI tools in a systematic way originally came from King's College London professor Dr. Oguz Acar but was passed along to Sumathi by OSU Department of Management lecturer Marla Mahar.

Others are her own creation, like AI Fusion Day, where Sumathi helps her class avoid common writing hazards - grammatical errors, weak critical arguments and a lack of theoretical integration - using AI.

For this task, Sumathi gives her class a writing assignment in which they cannot use AI, at least, at first. Once the writing is complete, she walks the students through using ChatGPT to edit the document with an eye on avoiding those common pitfalls. The class session becomes a real-time illustration of prompt engineering and how AI can help them scrub their writing.

"How can humans place themselves in the center of AI? That is the key for the responsible use of this technology," Sumathi said. "The students are writing the assignment themselves, but I want to teach them to place themselves in the center of AI to make the assignment look a little better."

Want a fun way to use AI in the classroom? Sumathi has you covered. She allows her students to use ChatGPT to produce skits to connect theory to practice. After a brief lecture on, say, workplace discrimination, students can use the chatbot to create a fun sketch to perform in front of the class. This not only helps the students better understand the topic in an entertaining way but also helps them master prompt engineering to produce the exact skit they want.

"We had the maximum fun last semester by doing this in class," Sumathi said. "Sometimes students think, 'My goodness, this class is going to be death by PowerPoint.' So, instead, I do 20 minutes of lecture and 30 minutes of fun skits that also help you learn the concepts."

Most of the conversations around AI in the classroom are student-focused, but Sumathi is also exploring how faculty can use AI to handle the day-to-day tasks involved in teaching hundreds of students each semester. This would free professors to focus on strategic teaching and creating the personal connections that help students succeed.

For OSU and beyond, Sumathi envisions the implementation of an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) that would evaluate, grade and coach students based on their needs in real time. For a writing assignment, the faculty member could tell the ITS program exactly what the assignment entails and what they are seeking from the student. Then, the ITS would assess the paper, provide feedback based on the student's academic profile and give the faculty member a synopsis of the student's progress to allow for individual corrective measures to be put in place.

"These are the benefits faculty can get if they try to understand what these AI tools can do," Sumathi said. "At the same time, we need our universities to come together to create a strategy and introduce these tools to our faculty. At that point, I think higher education would be at the next level. We are truly fertile ground for AI."

Photo by: Devin Flores
Story by: Stephen Howard | Discover@Spears Magazine

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